According to the diary-entry mentioned previously, the fictional inhabitants of Gondal had been prompted some time before to learn what lay beyond the boundaries of their fictional country. In my first published book of fiction, which appeared in print thirty-three years ago, the narrator reported, among other matters, that the chief character saw in his mind from time to time certain fictional personages whose district was bounded on one side by tamarisk trees. The narrator reported also certain details of what those personages might have seen from time to time in their own minds, but he reported mostly what they might thus have seen while they were concerned with such events as seemed to take place in their own district. If ever the narrator had reported that one or another of the fictional personages was prompted to learn what lay beyond the boundaries of his or her fictional country, then he, the narrator, would have reported that the personage saw in his or her mind a certain green-gold blur that occupied most of the horizon along one side of his or her district.
For much of the time while I was writing what later became my first published book of fiction, I had in mind a certain dusty backyard in an inland city of Victoria. At the rear end of that yard stood a fence of wire netting. On the far side of the wire netting was the yard behind the house where lived a man who was sometimes described by his neighbours as the mad old bachelor. This man bred a rare variety of poultry known as brown leghorns. The birds were kept in pens and cages while the backyard was used for growing grasses and grains for feeding to the birds. Along the wire netting mentioned earlier was what the owner of the birds called his patch of barley. If ever I myself had written a diary-entry comparable to the diary-entry mentioned above, I might have written that the people of the tamarisks were of a mind to discover the interior of the barley patch.
During the sixteen years when I was a teacher of fiction-writing, I read many books and articles by writers or about writers, and I collected many hundreds of statements that I thought might be of use to my students. Some of the statements I could hardly understand; others I disagreed with; but I put most of the statements in front of my students so that they might learn more than my own views. One statement that I kept for year after year among my notes but seldom read to the students reported how the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev claimed to have discovered many of the characters that he wrote about. According to the statement, Turgenev first met up with many of the characters while he slept. Certain personages seemed to appear to the writer in his dreams. The personages seemed to importune him; they seemed to beg him to write about them; they seemed to yearn to become characters in his writing.
During most of the years before I stopped writing fiction, I would have afforded little cheer to any personage who had begged me in a dream to allow him or her into my fiction. I would have tried to explain to the personage that he or she would still be no more than a personage, even if I were to report his or her existence in my fiction. I would have tried to explain that no sort of character could be said to exist in my fiction; that anyone mentioned in my fiction could be never more than a fictional personage, even if he or she might have seemed to resemble some or another person who lived in the place often called the real world or some or another character mentioned in some or another work of fiction. In fairness to myself, however, I might have tried to explain that the state of existence of the personages in my fiction was by no means wretched; that many such personages appeared against a background of mostly level grassy countryside; and that many a personage was the object of my continual curiosity, so that I longed to be on familiar terms with the personage, even if my only means of achieving this might have been the preposterous project of my becoming myself a personage in my own fiction.
On a certain day while I was trying to write the work of fiction that I would never complete, and while I was thinking confused thoughts about fictional characters and fictional personages and about the scenery where fictional events were reported as taking place and the scenery that might have lain out of sight beyond that scenery — one day, the thought occurred to me that the writer Ivan Turgenev had wrongly interpreted what he had seemed to see while he slept. He was reported as having seen personages pleading to be allowed into his works of fiction, but I wondered whether the writer had mistakenly interpreted the sighs, the groans, and the gestures of the personages. I supposed that Ivan Turgenev had been no less conceited than most writers of fiction. I supposed that he believed the characters in his fiction enjoyed a more satisfying existence than was enjoyed by the lost-seeming wayfarers who had come from he knew not whence in order to trouble his sleep. I then supposed further that the lost-seeming ones were not at all lost; that they stood on the outermost border of their native territory and pleaded with the writer of fiction not to try to write about them but to put away his writing and to join up with them: to become an inhabitant of their far-reaching countries or continents.
Whether or not I had correctly interpreted Ivan Turgenev’s experience, I was myself much encouraged by my speculations. Now, at last, I might answer with conviction many a question that had for long bothered me. During all the years while I had been a reader of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction — during all those years, I had wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest places mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or to her; what places such a character thought of during the hours or the days that were never reported in the text; what places such a character dreamed about — not only in sleep but during those waking moments the strangeness of which can hardly be described by the dreamer, much less suggested by a writer of fiction. Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about. Such a character looked often from the region of the text towards that further region or dreamed about it. Such a character, perhaps, remembered often some or another personage who had never left that further region but remained safely there, never mentioned or referred to in any passage of fiction. Now, I might try to glimpse in my own mind some of what might be glimpsed in the mind or remembered or dreamed of but never written about. Now, I was justified in believing in the existence of places beyond the places that I had read about or had written about: of a country on the far side of fiction.
It was never my intention to give a name to the country mentioned in the previous sentence, but a certain name later attached itself to that country. The name seems to me sometimes such a name as a child might devise for an imaginary country. At other times, the name seems connected with certain passages in my own fiction, as though I had sometimes alluded to the country even before I had become convinced of its existence. The name attached itself while I was reading soon after its publication The Brontës, by Juliet Barker, first published in London in 1994 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. In that book are many detailed accounts of the so-called imaginary countries written about by the Brontë siblings during their childhood and afterwards. A recurring name in those accounts is Glasstown. The name, of course, denotes a town or a city, but I soon found myself thinking of the name Glassland as though it denoted a country where fictional personages lived in the state of potentiality.